Beijing has more ships, missiles and more military personnel.
The competition for military power between the US and China has not yet stopped. The US Department of Defense or the Pentagon plans to continue to compete with China’s strength. In the next two years, they will equip themselves with drones and high-tech military equipment.
According to the Pentagon, the US military is now relying more on autonomous systems to compete with the Chinese military which has more personnel and weapons. This was emphasized by US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks at a military technology conference in Washington DC, Monday (28/8/2023).
Hicks stated, the demand for innovation is very crucial when carrying out strategic competition with China. He described that during the Cold War, China was a slow-developing competitor.
“However, while US troops fought in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years, China focused on building a modern military and carefully exploiting the advantages we have enjoyed for decades,” he said as reported by Aljazirah, Tuesday ( 29/8/2023 ) .
Hicks expressed Washington’s view of the Chinese threat and their ability to surpass the US military in numbers. In this case, he stated that the US was lucky to have the ability to imagine and create the character of future war tools.
Beijing’s main military advantage is, “It’s got more ships, more missiles, and more manpower,” Hicks said, adding that the US would counter that with more carefully designed, tougher devices to beat them.
“The US goal is to develop autonomous systems that scale to multiples of thousands, across multiple domains in the next 18 to 24 months,” Hicks said. With autonomous systems, costs are lower and there are fewer personnel on the front lines of the battlefield.
The US must be able to ensure that the Chinese leader is awake every day, thinking about the risks of aggression and concluding that aggression did not happen today. Not just today, he said, but every day between now and 2027, now and 2049, and in the future.
In its periodic assessment of US defense needs and priorities, last October the Pentagon stated that China presented a challenge and needed to strengthen itself to overcome China’s strength.
The National Defense Strategy prepared by the Pentagon states that China will however become a related competitor in the coming decades. The release of this strategy comes just weeks after the White House published its National Security Strategy.
The strategy also portrays China as a major competitor and capable of reshaping the international order. They will also become economic, diplomatic, military and technological powers in the future.
On the other hand, Washington is concerned with its ability to control the Indo Pacific region, claim over the South China Sea, and unite Taiwan and the Chinese mainland by force if necessary.
Source : Republika
